Is the fall air making your child a restless sleeper? Oftentimes the dry air can lead to chapped lips, dry skin, cold symptoms and severe congestion that can easily disrupt sleep. Rather than treating your child’s symptoms with cold and cough medicine, consider using a humidifier. A humidifier will increase the moisture in your child’s room, making it easy for him or her to breathe clearly. In particular, a cool mist humidifier will release fine droplets of cool mist into the air. To protect your child and keep him or her sleeping soundly, consider these fun, kid friendly humidifiers by Crane:

Crane EE-8189: The Crane Owl is my personal favorite! This sage owl will provide your kids with the cool, humidified air they need, while blending nicely into their room. This humidifier has a 2.1 gallon output of humidified air per day.

Crane EE-4139: The Crane Pig will help prevent flu, cold and cough symptoms. The EE-4139 features a 10 hour running time and is perfect for rooms up to 250 square feet in size.

Crane EE-5063: For Sponge Bob lovers, old and young, the Sponge Bob humidifier is a great appliance. This humidifier will provide relief from sinus congestion and flu symptoms. The fun Sponge Bob design will look great in any room and it includes a night light.

Crane EE-3186: The Crane Elephant will alleviate cold and flu symptoms without the use of medicines. The blue and white elephant humidifier features an automatic shut off and water level indicator.

If Sponge Bob or Hello Kitty isn’t your thing, take a look at our other Crane humidifiers. Be sure to keep a clean humidifier tank with the use of the Humidiclean Humidifier Cleaner and Descaler. It is important to maintain the inside of your humidifiers tank as a dirty tank will lead to a build up that can be released into your homes air.

Remember when you used to get sick as a child, and your mom made you gargle with warm salt water? Though I didn’t enjoy it much, it did work well to ease my cold symptoms. As it turns out, you don’t even need to add salt to your water to get the same healing effects.

Researchers have discovered that gargling with plain tap water helps prevent colds, sore throats and upper respiratory infections. It also eases the symptoms of those who have already gotten sick. However, the reason for this is yet to be determined.

We at Filters Fast have a theory: chlorine. It makes sense. Since chlorine is used in most municipal water treatment plants as a common water disinfectant, and is effective at killing bacteria and viruses, it’s no surprise that this same water can kill the bacteria and viruses that linger in the back of your throat and manifest themselves in the form of common cold symptoms, right? Not to mention, salt, or sodium chloride, is formed with one ion of chlorine, so it’s also no surprise that gargling with salt water would have the same effect.

My advice? Filter your tap water and use it for drinking and cooking instead of gargling. There are many other ways to kill bacteria and viruses, including a diet rich in oregano, which may also help prevent sickness.